Systems for controlling environmental conditions, for example in buildings, are becoming increasingly sophisticated. An environment control system may at once control heating and cooling, monitor air quality, detect hazardous conditions such as fire, carbon monoxide release, intrusion, and the like. Such environment control systems generally include at least one environment controller, which receives measured environmental values, generally from external sensors, and in turn determines set-points or command parameters to be sent to controlled appliances. The various components (e.g. controllers, sensors, controlled appliances) of an environment control system are generally referred to as environment control devices (EGDs).
Communications between an environment controller and the devices under its control (sensors, controlled appliances), or between multiple environment controllers, are based on wires in legacy environment control systems. The wires are deployed in the building where the environment control system is operating, for instance in the walls, ceilings, and floors of multiple rooms in the building.
For facilitating the deployment of a communication infrastructure between components of an environment control system, wireless communication technologies (e.g. Wi-Fi) are more and more frequently used instead of/complementarily to wires, for installing new environment control systems or upgrading existing environment control systems. Consequently, a building may end up with a duplicate wireless communication infrastructure: one dedicated to an environment control system for exchanging environmental data, and one dedicated to residents of the building for accessing the Internet. However, it would be more efficient to leverage the wireless communication infrastructure of the environment control system for providing Internet access to the residents of the building, at least at locations in the building where the environment control system is deployed.
Therefore, there is a need for environment control devices providing a Wi-Fi hotspot for accessing the Internet. Furthermore, there is a need of adapting environment control devices used in a daisy-chained communication configuration (which is a common configuration in the context of environment control systems) to provide a Wi-Fi hotspot for accessing the Internet.